This study offers additional nuance to the garden topos and trope within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian women's writing and extends the critical discussion of landscape and the garden as archetype in Canadian literature. This dissertation cross-fertilizes literary analysis with garden theory, using the work of such garden historians as John Dixon Hunt, Mark Francis, and Randolph Hester. The argument emphasizes that gardens in literature, like their actual counterparts, are an art of milieu, reflective of their socio-physical contexts. Both real and textual gardens are rhetorical: their content and formal features invite interpretation. A textual garden performs similarly to an actual garden by providing a spatial frame; a means of naturalization; a vivid exemplar of growth, fertility and beauty; a mediation of the artificial and the natural; a space of paradox; and a site of social performance. / The specific focus of this study is "domestic gardens": gardens that are intimate, immediate to the home, and part of daily life. Chapter one separates the garden from archetypal models by studying the garden as an actual place (specifically, the backwoods kitchen garden) described in the works of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Chapter two examines how the garden influences Moodie's and Traill's writing of the "transplanted" female emigrant. Chapter three presents the bower as an important precursor to the domestic garden through Gabrielle Roy's Enchantment and Sorrow (1984) and "Garden in the Wind" (1975). Through the bower, Roy mediates the female artist's ambivalence toward home in her pursuit of independence. Chapter four explores Carol Shields' sanctification of the domestic in her fiction through the concept of paradise as both an ideal setting and a mode of being. Chapter five provides a "garden tour" of the poetry of Lorna Crozier, culminating in the garden as a model for the text itself and for the genre of palimpsest. For these writers, literal and figurative gardens are ways of "planting" their characters and personae, "plotting" their narratives, mediating social conventions, and providing an interpretative lens through which readers may perceive the texts as a whole.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.102791 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Boyd, Shelley Elizabeth. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | © Shelley Elizabeth Boyd, 2006 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002589918, proquestno: AAINR32155, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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